“Name a space shuttle.” Silence. I did not really think it was that hard of a question, but when questioning elementary-aged children at a city summer camp on space trivia (we had just been visited by a representative from Space-X which tests their rockets here locally), I finally realized these children have grown up post-Columbia. The have been few shuttles going up and the excitement has been waning for many years. So, these kids know very little. So, when thinking up the week’s project, I decided to do a mini documentary film on the Columbia disaster to help create some shuttle-related memories for them.
Tag: film
I was digging through a box of stuff a friend left—I find myself doing this fairly often here in China, we leave little traces of our lives all around the place—and found a Polaroid camera and one cartridge of film, or paper, or whatever you call it for Polaroid. I have been excited ever since seeing it, and I can just feel that it will be the perfect ten pieces of paper to record a special upcoming life change.
For one, Polaroid is just cool. I remember wanting to shoot one when I was a kid when seeing some friend of my brother with one, but I was simply too little to be trusted, I guess. I have never pulled the trigger (more true than I ever knew till just recently, they really do have a trigger kind of mechanism) on a Polaroid. And second, I only have ten shots. That is just exciting in itself.
I have a quote to share today. Not only is this a quote from a famous dude (the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson), and not only is it about photography, but it really gives us a lot of context in which to put photography. I like to think outside of the digital box sometimes, and going back to daguerrotypes is certainly a way to do it, being the first method to record an image in a camera (…because cameras existed long before a method to capture that image, besides painting it).
There are folks who still use daguerrotypes today. Chuck Close is one hitting the photo world headlines lately with his groovy daguerrotype of Brad Pitt. As he says, in explanation to why he uses a 150 year old photographic method, photography never got better than it was at the beginning. Daguerrotypes are actually extremely high quality, higher than we can attain in paper or digital methods today (they are polished metal…silver coated copper, if I remember correctly).
So, with that wordy context, here is what it was like to sit for a daguerrotype photo.